Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
© Bettmann/CORBIS We can do anything if we do it together.
—William S. Knudsen, 1938 ON APRIL 30, 1939, the World’s Fair opened in New York. The General Motors pavilion would be its centerpiece and house its most talked-about exhibit.
The New York World’s Fair would be the biggest fair of all time. More than 44 million visitors would eventually come to the 1,262-acre site at Flushing Meadows. They would tour exhibits from across the country and from more than thirty countries—including several that would soon be at war.
The king and queen of England paid a visit to the British pavilion, which had on display a rare copy of Magna Carta. There was a pavilion for the League of Nations, although the unbridled aggression of Germany, Japan, and Italy had reduced that organization to an international joke. The world’s biggest pariah, Joseph Stalin, got what everyone agreed was one of the fair’s prime spots for the Soviet Union’s pavilion, just across from the so-called Court of Peace.
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